Search

thank you all

Xenakis in New York

"Waveforms"

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, March 1, 2010

Many twentieth-century
artists played with images of violence. The Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who
lived from 1922 to 2001, was one of relatively few who experienced extreme violence
at close range. In December, 1944, Xenakis was skirmishing in Athens, as a
member of the Communist forces, when a British shell exploded almost on top of
him. (The British had turned from fighting Nazis to fighting Communists.) Two
people beside him were killed instantly. Xenakis’s jawbone was shattered, his
palate pierced, his left eye destroyed. “There were bits of teeth, flesh,
blood, holes,” Xenakis recalled. “I was choking in my own blood and vomiting.”
Surgery restored his face, but for the rest of his life he exhibited fearsome
scars. Olivier Messiaen, who taught Xenakis in Paris, remembered seeing that
visage in class for the first time. Here was a man, Messiaen thought, “not like
the others.”

Indeed, in the chic, brainy
world of postwar avant-garde music, Xenakis was the odd man out. He was a
thinker of uncommonly esoteric tendencies—a trained engineer and a
mathematician whose primary theoretical text, Formalized Music, contains nearly
as many equations as sentences. To understand fully how his pieces are put
together, you need a good working knowledge of probability theory and combinatorial
mathematics, among other disciplines. Yet Xenakis cannot be described as a
cerebral artist. A master of sensation and surprise, he produced some of the
rawest, wildest music in history—sounds that explode around the ears. Rarefied
methods were employed to release primordial energies. Milan Kundera, who
listened obsessively to recordings of Xenakis’s works in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia,
heard in them a “noise of the world, a ‘sonorous mass,’ which, instead of
gushing from the heart, comes to us from the outside, like the steps of the rain
or the voice of the wind.”

A composer of such fierce
originality will always compel attention. In fact, Xenakis has become almost a
pop classic on New York’s new-music scene, his music drawing healthy crowds.
Currently adding to the hubbub is an
exhibition of his compositional, mathematical, and architectural sketches, at
the Drawing Center, on Wooster Street. The fact that Xenakis was not only a
major composer but also an

architect of some talent
places him in a rare category: he expanded the possibilities of two distinct
domains. Whether the physical damage inflicted on the young Xenakis affected
his subsequent work is unknowable, but with his one eye he saw things that no
one else imagined.

Xenakis escaped to France
from Greece in 1947, a death sentence on his head. Upon arriving in Paris,
which became his permanent home, he landed a job as an engineer for Le
Corbusier. His love of curving forms and irregular patterns—and his skill in
bringing them to life—had a perceptible effect on two major Le Corbusier
structures: the monastery at Sainte-Marie de la Tourette, with its undulating
glass façade, and the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, with
its paraboloidal shape. Yet music ultimately exerted a stronger hold. Messiaen,
whose Catholic mysticism might seem far removed from Xenakis’s radical
rationalism, played a pivotal role in his development. Messiaen advised his
student not to choose among his diverse interests but to unite them: “Be Greek,
be a mathematician, be an architect, and out of it all make music!”

The exhibition at the Drawing
Center offers a striking demonstration of how Xenakis worked out his musical
and his visual ideas side by side. In preparing Metastasis, his breakthrough
orchestral piece of 1953-54, he drew ruled parabolas on graph paper, then
translated the shapes into music, mapping them as expanding webs of glissandos.
(The Beatles roughly echoed that effect in the orchestral crescendos of "A Day
in the Life.") A few years later, when Xenakis worked on the Philips Pavilion,
he cast similar shapes in prestressed concrete. (Though the design was largely
his, Le Corbusier initially refused to give him credit, and subsequently fired
him when he protested.) Xenakis also studied the emergence of large-scale forms
from minuscule, ostensibly random movements, as in gas clouds and insect swarms.
You can see that effect in the rippling windows at Sainte-Marie de la Tourette,
and you can hear it in the seething textures of Pithoprakta (1955-56).

After breaking with Le
Corbusier, Xenakis attempted to establish his own identity as an architect,
but, except for a few vacation homes and renovations, his projects went
unrealized. Some, in fact, were unrealizable: his Cosmic City would have consisted
of various three-mile-high towers, each accommodating five million people. He
did, however, mesmerize large crowds with a series of “polytopes,” or multimedia
experiences, which blended electronic sound, live performance, light shows, and
temporary structures. The settings included the Roman baths of Cluny, the ruins
of Mycenae (Xenakis returned to Greece after the fall of the military junta, in
1974), and Persepolis, in Iran. Empress Farah, the wife of the Shah, admired Xenakis
and regularly invited him to her arts festival in Shiraz. At one point, she
asked him to design a vast arts complex for that city. The plans are
intriguing: one notation calls for a ten-thousand-square-foot Hall of
Nothingness. In 1976, however, Xenakis stopped working in Iran, citing its “inhuman
and unnecessary police repression.”

He went on making music, his
choices as unpredictable as the motions of his beloved particles. Sometimes he
set aside buzzing textures for austere, chantlike melodies evocative of ancient
Greece: this style is particularly
prominent in his feverish setting of The Oresteia, which emerged between 1966
and 1992. He also found new ways of translating images into sound, favoring
branching patterns that he called “arborescences.” His final works tend toward extreme density, with rough chorales that are like
the rumbling of sullen mobs. He retained his love of nature, spending part of
each summer in Corsica, where he eventually designed a little home for his
family. His daughter, Mâkhi, describes him cooped up in a tent during a
thunderstorm, counting the seconds between lightning flashes, and then running
out into the storm to exult in the divine chaos.

At Xenakis concerts in recent
months, two moments stood out. One was Steven Schick’s hyperathletic
interpretation of the percussion piece Psappha (1975), in a generally excellent
program at the Miller Theatre, last October, featuring the International
Contemporary Ensemble. The other was the JACK Quartet’s howlingly beautiful rendition
of Tetras (1983), at the Morgan Library, earlier this month. Both performances conveyed
the earthy complexity of the composer’s aesthetic—what Schick, in his book The Percussionist’s Art, calls a “state
of grace,” where “the vehicle of the score is synonymous with the vessel of a human
being who seeks to embody and communicate it.”

Psappha,
which pays homage to Sappho’s incantatory rhythms, is scored for six groups of
instruments, the choice of materials being left largely to the player. Schick
used woodblocks, bongos, a tom-tom, congas, a bass drum, steel pipes, a frying
pan, and two Xenakis specialties: simantra, resonant wooden bars modelled
on Byzantine church instruments; and sixxen, or bars of metal. The music
proceeds from gently purring, interlocking patterns to an apocalyptic episode of
bass-drum thwacks interspersed with silences, then rises to a shimmering, accelerating
finale. The score presents various riddles, not least a multilayered passage
that apparently requires the player to grow a third arm. Xenakis often inserted
such “impossible” moments: the piano piece Evryali
notoriously includes a C-sharp that is a half step higher than the highest note
on the instrument.

Schick, a master
percussionist who has played Psappha
some six hundred times, has called such moments “koans.” They don’t so much
frustrate the performer as draw him into the creative process, dangling possibilities that
remain just out of reach. By now, Schick inhabits Psappha so thoroughly that the piece seems little more than a
firing of his synapses, a negotiation between his mind and his body. There’s
nothing remotely intellectual about the experience; you feel that he could play
the work on any street corner or subway platform and draw a cheering crowd.
Certainly, Schick elicited a happy roar from the audience at Miller, although
what was most striking about the performance was not its physical energy but
its emotional acuity: there was something lonely and questing about the
quarter-hour ritual, as if those ever-changing pulses were coded messages of
the soul.

If Psappha came across as a personal utterance, Tetras seemed a riotous celebration of sound. It begins with
Xenakis’s signature glissando, oscillating on the first violin. The players do
all manner of ungodly things to their instruments: draw the bow behind the
bridge or across the tailpiece, tap the wood, trail a fingernail on the string.
In one ear-bending section, these noises pop up on a strict rhythmic grid, in a
kind of toneless fugue. The formal plan is crystalline, with the music falling into
crisply defined sections and building to finely controlled climaxes. In
contrast to many experimental scores, nothing goes on an instant too long. Tetras is a late-twentieth-century
masterpiece, worthy of comparison to the quartets of Berg, Ives, Bartók, and
Shostakovich.

The JACK Quartet,
whose name is an acronym of the first names of its members (John Pickford
Richards, Ari Streisfeld, Christopher Otto, and Kevin McFarland), specializes
in the pricklier end of contemporary music. Like
Steven Schick, these young players render abstruse ideas as organic gestures.
At their Morgan concert, they presented all four of Xenakis’s pieces for string
quartet—a program they have also recorded on the Mode label. Xenakis once
announced that he sought “a total exaltation in which the individual mingles,
losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect.” If
these performances didn’t quite achieve that transcendent goal, they came
exhilaratingly close.